Can you do your own Financial Planning?

  Many people ask me- will I be able to do financial planning myself? My answer is sure, but if you are a student of financial planning or the head of research in a pharmaceutical company trying to do your own financial planning, you need to know the following things before you start.  Just check [...]

Financial mistakes: Why it happens?

Have you wondered why people make mistakes while buying financial products? Well here is what I think: 1. Products are complicated: Most financial products are complicated. This is absolutely necessary so that the charges can be well hidden. 2. Salesmen are always in a hurry: This is easy to understand. They are paid for closing, [...]

Make your own financial plan!

Make that first investment; waiting is costing you a bomb! After every lecture on financial planning, I get many requests for information from, young people just starting out in life. Regardless of their age, people do realize that a little upfront planning and action can put them ahead of the game. Thanks to the paid [...]

Personal finance execution is terrible..

Too much is made out of entry load, exit load, ulip, cost of fund management etc. Most of the loss (leakage) in personal finance can be attributed to the inefficiency of execution. Even good advice is lost to poor execution! Let me enumerate (Ripley’s should not use it in their Believe it or Not, please) [...]

Wrong assumptions by Financial Planners

I am perhaps one of those rare people who say ‘An investor is personally responsible for Ruining his portfolio’. Of course there are people who help him on the way, but primarily he and he alone is responsible. A financial planner makes some assumptions about client behavior. Let us see some of the impossibly irrational [...]

Financial Planning questionnaire…

People ask me what should a financial planner do? Well if I were to write a book on financial planning, I could write a few chapters on this topic. One thing however he MUST do is ask you a lot of questions – some painful. For example when I talk to a new, unknown person [...]